Shells Come In, Lava Goes Out

I don’t usually tell a story here in pictures, but I think for tonight’s post I’ll make an exception.   Yesterday we travelled around a good portion of the perimeter of Maui to see multiple sights and experience as much as we could pack into a single day.   The highlight of the stops was the black sand beach that we’d been telling the children about for months.

I'd been to a black sand beach before on my last trip to Hawaii, circa 1980.   I remembered the sand being black, but not much else about the experience.   I had heard about them many times from people and in stories but had never really bothered to think about why one beach might be black sand and the overwhelmingly larger population of beaches around the world would be ‘sand’ colored.  I mean it was obvious, right?  Hawaii had volcanos that made volcanic rock which was black, so yeah, black sand beach was logical.

It wasn’t until I set foot on the beach itself that I had a huge realization about how and why it was a, ‘black sand’ beach.   It took all of ten seconds to realize and when I did, it was one of those head slap moments it was so obvious, so elegant, and so very beautiful.

Here’s the beach as we approached from up above.  I was the last one down so I took a few pictures on the way.   From this distance it looks like any other beach with the exception of the black part.

I went down a long staircase and came out on the beach itself and this is where I had my realization.   First let me compare with regular sand beaches.   The material for the sand is shells and other silica products.   The location these components come from is the ocean itself.   There is a huge factory of materials being made beyond the water’s edge and when those materials are washed up and beat against each other, they’re broken down until they’re the small particles we know of as sand.

The black sand beach is made of lava rocks though.   The source of all the material for this particular black sand beach was in our immediate vicinity, the black lava rocks themselves.   When I stepped out onto the beach it wasn’t a beach at first, it was smooth, black lava rocks.   The erosion zone wasn’t vast, it was right here and very specific.   Fifty feet back from the water’s edge you had pretty large rocks; the closer you got to the waves the rocks turned into stones, then pebbles and then sand.

To give you a bit of perspective, here’s Pengi, our trip Travel Buddy, reclining on his beach chair in the pebble area of the beach.

The pebbles are a bit tricky to walk on.   They’re not sharp, but they move under your feet in a strangely uncomfortable way.   The sand, or super tiny rock areas are easier to walk on but the sand sticks to you and is hard to get off.

Here’s my daughter in the black sand, sitting on a rock that will someday be broken down into future black sand.

It was beautiful to look at and visually deceptive.   It looked like there were large droplets of water sitting on top of the sand when the waves would retreat but it was larger rocks, so smooth from the erosion process that they looked like water on top of sand.

After saying hello to my daughter, Nana and Papa, I asked where my son and husband were because I hadn’t seen them on the beach area.   Just then, I heard my name being called from above.  I looked up towards the direction we’d descended from via the long flight of stairs to see this:

"How did you get up there," I asked?   My husband pointed and my father-in-law told me there was a lava tube that you could enter into near the bottom of the steps.

Getting into the lava tube required some initial hunching down but once inside, the cave area was quite large.

I was debating climbing up out of the tube.   I was trying to figure out which way up would be closer to where my son and husband were were—and which option I though I could actually manage.  Just then I saw my son pop his head into the opening right above me.   I asked him, “is your father up there with you?”   He replied in very excited voice and then disappeared out of sight, “yeah, he’s taught me a lot about safety!”

We stayed for a while longer at the black sand beach, until the sun was threatening to set.   My son and husband never got in the water at the beach they were having so much fun climbing.   I had to get their attention with some waving from the top of the steps, giving them the “wrap it up” hand signal to get them to come in at all.  You can see them in the orange and red shirts sitting on a rock overlooking the beach directly below.

I think everyone agreed it was definitely worth the long ride to get to experience the Hana black sand beach.

The Big Boy Update:  For lunch on our way to Hana we stoped at a roadside restaurant—one of the few options to eat on the whole trip.   My son ordered a lamb burger with mushrooms, bacon, lettuce, tomato and pickles.   He typically wouldn’t eat something like that.   We told him we were impressed, that his taste buds were growing up.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter wants to do everything anyone else can do.   She doesn’t want to be limited by her lack of vision.   When she found out her brother and father were climbing up on top of the lava rocks, she wanted to go too.   I knew, well, we all knew she wouldn’t be able to be safe up there because it required sight to make the best calls on what to do and not do.   My husband is very kind though.   He told her when I said something to him, “Reese, come on, let’s go. There is a place we can climb close to here that I know you’ll enjoy.”   My son realized what his father was doing and he ran over, saying it was a great place and he’d go with them too.   My daughter came back, very happy she’d gotten to do what her brother had done, even though there had been a substitution in location.